It is often desirable, particularly in the food industry, to preserve heat-sensitive foods, such as milk or goods with delicate flavor components, by heating such heat-sensitive foods to high temperatures for very short periods of time, as in pasteurization and sterilization of food products. However, many such systems are available only for relatively large scale food productions and do not permit small scale laboratory productions or experiments with valuable, low volume material, such as heat-sensitive biological fluids or suspensions, used in the laboratory, such as fermentation media, vaccines, liposomes and cell culture media. At present, the primary commercial method to remove microorganisms from heat-sensitive liquid material is the use of ultrafiltration to affect a 6-log reduction of the bacteria.
Further, it is often desirable to pasteurize biological fluids or suspensions, such as plasma or protein-containing fluids, to destroy selected pathogenic organisms, such as infectious agents like a virus or other agent compound substantially of protein and nucleic acids, without destroying or substantially altering other microorganisms or precipitating or destroying other proteinaceous matter material. For example, it is desirable to destroy selectively virus and virus-type agents from blood plasma or serum without clotting, clouding, aggregating, coagulating, precipitating or biologically altering the plasma in the process.
Therefore, it is desirable to provide for a continuous, fast, heat processing apparatus and a method for the high temperature, short time heating, for example, to provide sterilization or pasteurization of heat-sensitive fluids, including body fluids, particularly for use with low volume biological fluids and for small scale laboratory use.